Baked Macaroni Comforts Me

There are days when everything seems sullen.  Days like today. I felt sick waking up.  The head throbbed all throughout the day. Not painful enough to warrant a visit to the doctor, but there it was, a dull ache.  It seems that the sinusitis is acting up again.

A development came which literally pulled all my plans into fast forward.  And I have to work  twice as  fast  to  make sure that the pie shop will open in time before I move to another, more demanding project.  On top of that, I had to go out to ship a few stuffs for the online shop, which is pretty fine in itself, but the sun in Davao at noon is unforgiving. The heat was enough to make me a bit dizzy.

An afternoon of typing up the plans and reading up on biz stuffs and I know I needed something comforting at the end of the day.  Something delicious and simple enough to make.

I checked the pantry: tomato sauce, quickmelt cheese, bell pepper, a pack of chorizo,  corned beef. Perfect for a down home Baked Mac.

I’ve made countless variations of baked mac in the past ten years.  My standby recipe had rosemary and dried basil in the red sauce. I even made it into a sort of sideline, selling baked macs in small  aluminum  trays the size of a Harry Potter Hardbound  in the office  for PHP 65.00 about six years ago.

As you might have noticed from my past recipe postings, I have the habit of getting a recipe and changing it alltogether depending on what ingredients I have at hand.  For this batch of Baked Mac, I used Ms. Veneracion’s Baked Mac recipe as a loose guide.

I didn’t have ground beef so I made do with a can of Purefoods corned beef. I had no italian sausage but  there was a pack of chinese chorizo, so off it went to the sauce.

For the red sauce, I added  paprika, italian seasoning, and a dash of cream (just because there was an open container of cream in the ref).

I usually don’t use bechamel for the toppings in baked mac, relying on a can of cream of mushroom soup and grated cheese for the thick cheese layer but since I didn’t have a can of mushroom soup, I made do with bechamel sauce. For the Bechamel (white cheese sauce) I omitted the water, added an additional half cup of milk, omitted the cream cheese and added a dash of pepper and a pinch of nutmeg. For the cheese, I used the usual Quickmelt Cheese.

It turned out okay 🙂 The bechamel was a bit too brown perhaps because I used evap milk which has a darker, dirty white color instead of the fresh/skim milk from the carton. But the cheese flavor was spot on and I loved the sweetness that the chorizo bits gave to the red sauce. Pretty yummy and utterly comforting.